History

All satellite images produced by NASA are published by Earth Observatory and are freely available to the public. Several other countries have satellite imaging programs, and a collaborative European effort launched the ERS and Envisat satellites carrying various sensors. There are also private companies that provide commercial satellite imagery. In the early 21st century satellite imagery became widely available when affordable, easy to use software with access to satellite imagery databases became offered by several companies and organizations.

Uses

Satellite images have many applications in agriculture, geology, forestry, biodiversity conservation, regional planning, education, intelligence and warfare. Images can be in visible colours and in other spectra. There are also elevation maps, usually made by radar imaging. Interpretation and analysis of satellite imagery is conducted using software packages like ERDAS Imagine or ENVI. Some of the first image enhancement of satellite photos was conducted by the U.S. Government and its contractors. For example ESL Incorporated developed some of the earliest two dimensional Fourier transforms applied to digital image processing to address NASA photos as well as national security applications.

Resolution and data

There are two different types of resolution when discussing satellite imagery; radiometric and geometric. Radiometric resolution refers to the effective bit-depth of the sensor (number of greyscale levels) and is typically expressed as 8-bit (0-255), 11-bit (0-2047), 12-bit (0-4095) or 16-bit (0-65,535). Geometric resolution refers to the satellite sensor's ability to effectively image a portion of the earth's surface in a single pixel and is typically expressed in terms of Ground Sample Distance, or GSD. GSD is a term containing the overall optical and systemic noise sources and is useful for comparing how well one sensor can "see" an object on the ground within a single pixel. For example, the GSD of Landsat is ~30m, which means the smallest unit that maps to a single pixel within an image is ~30m x 30m. Contrast this with the latest commercial satellite (GeoEye 1) with a GSD of 0.41m (effectively 0.5 due to govt restrictions). 3600 pixels from a GeoEye image of the same area of the earth will fit into a single Landsat pixel. The resolution of satellite images varies depending on the instrument used and the altitude of the satellite's orbit. For example, the Landsat archive offers repeated imagery at 30 meter resolution for the planet, but most of it has not been processed from the raw data. Landsat 7 has an average return period of 16 days. For many smaller areas, images with resolution as high as 10 cm can be available.Fact: date=April 2008